Harry had no realistic expectation of privacy. He invited large numbers of strangers to his hotel suite for alcohol-fuelled high jinks involving stripping naked without any checks on who was present. No attempt was made to remove mobile camera phones.

Another semi-clad celebrity who could also presumably have had no reasonable expectation of privacy from the Sun was Kate Moss, photographed shortly before the Harry furore, topless on a yacht in St Tropez. In this case, there seems to have been no missed opportunity to frisk everyone in a several-mile radius for image-recording apparatus, and thus it appears that The Sun is trying to both have its Kate, and eat it.

But, remember, kids…back to The Sun’s defensive editorial:

The final irony is that it is France—smug, privacy-obsessed France—that published grossly intrusive pictures no decent British paper would touch with a bargepole.

If The Sun’s staff took some time out from peddling selected smut, they could buy a dictionary—or hire a pap to snap a celeb reading a dictionary with her boobs out, like a decent paper would—and learn what ‘irony’ means. (We think there’s a picture of Britain’s breast newspaper making a big deal about not revelling in outdoor boobies.) Oh, and check out ‘smug’ while you’re at it: I haven’t heard France making self-satisfied, sweeping statements about heterogeneous groups lately. Which makes the accusation, in itself, ironic. Oh, stop it with the long words and turn to Page 3 for the things that really interest the public’s bargepole.